


Denial

by Lilyture



Category: South Park
Genre: Angst, Don't copy to another site, Grief/Mourning, Horror, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 18:09:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17288888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilyture/pseuds/Lilyture
Summary: Craig returns from a mission. Tweek is frazzled.





	Denial

It isn’t him.   
  
That’s the worry that nags in the back of Tweek’s head. It repeats itself as he watches Craig, his Craig, read over the thin DVD case he continually turns over in his hands. Craig’s constantly reading. Anything that has words printed he has his hands and eyes over. It’s a weird obsession but Tweek wonders if reading is what got him through that.   
  
Whatever “that” is. Craig was gone for two years on a mission. Craig told Tweek about this “exciting” opportunity over dinner one night and he remembers his stomach dropping. He asked Craig when he’d come back, but Craig didn’t answer right away. Tweek already knew anyway.   
  
Never.   
  
But here he is. Something must have gone wrong, like that one Apollo mission Craig would talk about in high school. He just showed up at the front door, dark hair sticking out like crow feathers beneath his navy chullo. He looked tired and thin, but mostly just blank.  Tweek swore to himself that he would forever hate Craig Tucker, but he dropped it all instantly in favor of the dream that came true before him. He pounced on Craig and kissed him, lingering at his lips for a moment before pecking at his temple and then dragging him back into their home.   
  
It had been a month since then and Tweek had tried, oh how he tried, to be mad. He thought about making Craig sleep on the sofa, but seeing his fiancé wobble with fatigue made him reconsider. Then he tried to keep to his own side and Craig seemed to respect that. But Tweek couldn’t help but brush up against his arm, his chest, or bumping his knee as he moved. Half an hour in and he was already curled up beside him.   
  
Craig’s exhaustion could be fixed by sleep and his hunger by Tweek’s cooking. Within a week he seemed back to physical health.   
  
After day one, Tweek knew something was off.   
  
One night he woke up to the bathroom light on, a sliver of it peeking out the cracked door to line up with his closed eyes. When, after too much time had passed and Craig hadn’t come back, he dragged himself out of bed and peered in the door, eyes in narrow slits to shield them from the sting of the LEDs in the bathroom. Craig stood against the wall, reading the back of a bottle of royal purple mouthwash. Tweek asked him what the fuck he was doing. His fiancé shrugged.   
  
“Something wrong?”   
  
“You should be asleep,” Tweek hissed, flicking the lights off.   
  
“Oh.”   
  
Oh.   
  
It’s that sound, word?, that makes Tweek’s stomach rumble. It’s sarcastic, he knows, he thinks, he can’t tell. Something in Craig’s voice and Tweek’s tired brain blurs the line. He brushes it off.   
  
Whatever happened penetrates Craig’s mind every second of the day. Tweek knows this because Craig seems to never stop asking questions about the most mundane shit. It’s especially prevalent when Tweek bakes, a practice that Craig has never shown much interest in before. He asks about the cream of tartar and meringue, about the role of eggs in cakes, about why glass bowls are superior to plastic. He has to shoo Craig off, unable to cope with his fiancé looking over his shoulder and spouting off questions like he’s four.   
  
When Tweek brings up old memories and they reminisce. Tweek does most of the talking, as always, but Craig nods along. Sometimes he talks about memories of the shit he did with Clyde, Token, and Jimmy before Tweek moved into the circle. It’s reassuring. But at the same time, when he’s talking, he thinks Craig is looking too intent, too interested in memories they’ve talked about for years. It’s in his head, he knows it. His anxiety sets him off.   
  
Craig’s choices in food changes. He watches horror but he doesn’t find interest in it. Instead, he starts watching documentaries. His parents call when they hear he’s back, his mother sobbing over the phone, and Craig, whose soft spot for Laura didn’t go past Tweek’s notice, abruptly hung up. Said he was tired of talking.   
  
It’s when Tweek brings out the photographs that the paranoia blows up. There are large stacks of all of Craig’s guinea pigs. Craig knows them all by their number since they all are designated “Stripe.” Even after two years without seeing them, he recalls most without trouble. It’s what he says when Tweek’s putting the albums into the boxes that makes his alarm bells ring and his stomach flip.   
  
“Seems like a lot of work for a rodent.”   
  
It’s like he doesn’t care about Stripe. When Tweek mentions they should go get a Stripe #8, Craig declines, saying there are more important things to worry about.   
  
He doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like that whatever happened changed Craig so much made him stop caring about guinea pigs or horror movies. Unless it’s not him. That it makes him not want to talk to his mom or dad anymore. Or he doesn’t care because it’s not him.   
  
Tweek knows his paranoia sometimes gets the best of him. It puts insane doubts in his mind and, even knowing that they’re insane. Craig is still Craig. Whatever happened at NASA had traumatized him and, in typical Tucker fashion, Craig is burying it. He doesn’t talk about it because he’s afraid and he justs wants to go back to the way things used to be.   
  
It’s a near-death experience that’s changed his future husband. It says so in the log that he should have never touched. Craig writes about the pain, about his broken leg, about the cutoff from mission control. The log is made of graph paper, Craig’s preferred writing medium, and the pages are tearing from the spine. The damn thing barely closes and is so hard to read from the way the ink runs from Craig’s constant water spills and not to mention just how bad Craig’s handwriting is to begin with.   
  
The end is what bothers him. Craig writes what he thinks will be his last words. There’s even a passage dedicated to Tweek himself and Tweek has to bite back tears as he reads it, huddled in their closet so Craig doesn’t catch him. The passage ends. And that’s it.   
  
That shouldn’t be it.   
  
Craig was saved. He was rescued. He was brought back. Why didn’t he write any of it down? What happened? Obviously, he was injured and in pain and just glad that someone got to him and brought him back out of the wreckage. No one in their right mind would be worried about writing in the log now. But Tweek’s amygdala needs more, it needs to be reassured, coaxed, and Tweek finally decides to stop beating around the bush.   
  
The sun has dove beneath the horizon. The closet light goes off as he stumbles through the dark, notebook in hand, out into the hall. Blue light bounces from downstairs up the stairwell and Tweek uses it to climb down.   
  
Craig sits on the sofa, light flickering across his face as a scene from some sci-fi horror Tweek doesn’t recognize that flashes on the screen. He watches it with half-interest and half-meh. Tweek clears his throat and Craig turns his head to the right to look at him.   
  
“Are you Craig?” Tweek asks slowly, realizing how stupid it must sound.   
  
“Yes,” Craig says just as slowly, looking at Tweek like he’d sprouted an extra head.   
  
Tweek stands still, trying to think of another way to ask that doesn’t sound crazy. “Were you the Craig that left two years ago?”   
  
There’s a brief period where neither talk and the only sounds are the ray guns from the TV speakers. Tweek’s paranoia and his logic are at war and he just wants Craig to put an end to it. His stomach does summersaults. Craig looks back at the screen, and Tweek thinks it’s because Craig thinks he’s fucking with him. He doesn’t know how to go about explaining his worry, about what he read in the log, about Craig’s weird behavior, and how he just needs Craig to assure him that he’s overthinking everything like always.  But he doesn’t need to because Craig looks back again and finally speaks, finally giving Tweek the relief he needs so they can go back to wedding planning and whose family they spend Christmas with this year and maybe even nudging at adoption and-   
  
“I don’t think so.”   
  
Nothing’s said. He almost laughs, because this is an obvious joke, but he can’t. Because Craig isn’t looking at him like Craig, he’s looking at him blankly. Not reserved, not stony, not stoic, not in the way a person does because they choose to refrain from expressing. It’s just blank, curious, watchful, and it sends shivers down Tweek’s spine.   
  
“What are you?” Tweek says, releasing the breath he didn’t even realize he was holding.   
  
It trails its eyes up to the ceiling to think. Craig always looked down. It’s such an insanely small detail but Tweek can’t help but feel alert. “I don’t know.”   
  
This is a nightmare. No, it’s a joke. Craig’s fucking with him. He has to be. Tweek wants him to be. But it’s not. Tweek knows it’s not because some part of him already knew the real answer before it told him the truth. He wants to run, he wants to scream, he wants to hide, but he feels stuck, captured, pinned down by gray eyes staring back at him.   
  
“I’m watching a movie,” it announces and Tweek comes back to reality. “Want to watch it with me?”   
  
He stands, thinking about what he should do. What was the best course of action? His logic goes through all the smart and completely understandable actions one could take. Run, call for help, grab a weapon. But the same part of him that knew it wasn’t Craig knows what he’s going to do. He’s already decided. He decided the moment his subconscious recognized what was going on.   
  
He was just in denial. And now he was in acceptance.   
  
It’s one step. Then two. Then three. On the way, the log goes in the bin. It will need to doused in kerosene and burned to ash, but the bin will do for now. He steps in front and then eases on the cushion to its left.   
  
It snakes an arm, Craig’s arm, around his shoulder. Except it’s not Craig’s arm. Craig’s arm, like the rest of him, is frozen somewhere on the surface of Europa.   
  
It kisses him with Craig’s lips the same way that Tweek had when it showed up at his front door, peck and all. Craig’s voice is in his ear when it says, “I love you.”   
  
And Tweek takes a shaky breath. “I love you too.”

**Author's Note:**

> A rewrite of an old work that I deleted a few months ago but tried again. Based on Annihilation.


End file.
